Agricultural product giant Monsanto needed to build a new data center to support analysis of information collected from labs, field trials and breeding stations around the world. Plans were sown with energy efficiency in mind. The result: a facility that

: Going With the Flow">

Showers attributes Monsanto's energy conservation success to the company that helped design the new data center, Bruns-Pak of Edison, N.J. "It had been 40 years since we built our last data center, so there was very little expertise sitting around the table at Monsanto," he says.

"Data centers are our only line of business," says Mark Evanko, a principle engineer and partner with Bruns-Pak. The company offers consulting advice, design and engineering services, and construction project management. The only thing it doesn't do is the actual construction. It has a client list that spans most industries and includes Wal-Mart, Coca-Cola, Wachovia Bank and the U.S. Postal Service.

Energy efficiency is a high priority with every client his firm sees these days, Evanko says, and for good reason: Data centers typically consume 15 times more energy per square foot than a typical office building. In the U.S., data centers consume an estimated 20 billion to 30 billion kilowatt hours of electricity (about the same as the entire state of Utah) and the number of installed servers is forecasted to increase as much as 50 percent over the next three to four years, according to research firm IDC.

One of the more innovative features of the new Monsanto data center is that it relies almost entirely on air flow and air-flow handling for cooling. The building is void of any cooling units found in conventional data centers. The building has two floors: The first floor has a 20-foot ceiling and houses all the utilities-power switches and backup, the air-flow handling units (essentially, large fans) and cable distribution. The second floor has a 17-foot ceiling with a three-foot raised floor. The exterior walls have a similar three-foot air space and together the walls and raised floors provide a space for air circulation.

A good deal of time was spent during the planning stages modeling the air flow in the building, Showers says. Essentially, the design was based on the concept of hot and cold aisles of air. The hot-running servers suck cold air up from the raised floor space and the heated air then rises and gets "flushed" around to the edges of the raised floor and is sucked back in through the exterior walls and down to the first floor, where it cools. The air in the data center is recirculated five times per hour, and approximately 20 percent outside air is introduced with each air change.

Another impressive feature of the data center is its exterior wall. A glass shield serves as a protective barrier; it's able to withstand a tornado with 200 mph winds, and able to deflect 90 percent of the sun's heat.

On the computing infrastructure side, Showers says Monsanto has focused on server consolidation, relying on such technologies as VMWare's virtualization software, which essentially divides one physical server into multiple virtual environments. For example, Monsanto was able to consolidate 40 servers running an Oracle database in the SAP environment to just three servers.

Looking only at the building infrastructure, Showers says, the new data center is 27 percent more energy efficient than the old building. Energy consumed by computers is a somewhat different story. Even though technologies like server virtualization and more powerful dual-core blade servers have meant Monsanto can do a lot more with its existing infrastructure, its overall computing needs are growing rapidly-30 percent over the last 12 months. That means total energy consumption is remaining the same or growing, so there's still plenty of room for improvement.

Close to 150 employees worked in the old data center building, a number that was uncomfortably high for Monsanto. While physical security precautions restricted access to sensitive systems, Monsanto wanted to reduce the number of non-IT personnel in the building. The new building can operate with just seven full-time employees, which greatly improves the physical security profile.

"With a separate building we were really able to segregate it and significantly limit who can have access," Showers says. "That in itself is a major improvement for us."

Contributing EditorMel Duvall is a veteran business and technology journalist, having written for a variety of daily newspapers and magazines for 17 years. Most recently he was the Business Commerce Editor for Interactive Week, and previously served as a senior business writer for The Financial Post.